Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Pass!  Yes, yes, it will cost YOU more. But it will use less power, so the PLANET will be better off! EOL
[SNIP] |
But Steve: The PLANET would benefit more if I spent the $4 difference on a more important problem.
Like a more-frequently-used light-bulb. Or a more-efficient fridge or A/C, or any of a zillion other things. And because the list of things to improve is
so long that I can't do them all, this is a case involving
substitution, not addition.
So, am I more responsible if I fix the trivial (but low-priority) thing first? Or am I more responsible if I fix something with faster payback first?
Note: I'm not suggesting that the lightbulb should be incandescent forever! I'm asking "where should I start?"
I presume that you agree that I should fix the high-pay-off things first. We can argue later about whether that payoff is in terms of $ or carbon or air-pollution... but when we're talking about electricity (and reducing usage thereof), KWh per month (or year, or whatever) work just fine as a proxy for any of those benefits.
I argue that the responsible choice is to upgrade that rarely used bulb only when either (a) the cost difference drops to $1 or so (raising its priority on the list), or (b) I've already made as many of the higher-priority changes as possible.
And no sooner.
The issue here isn't whether or not to reduce usage. It's "how to decide where to deploy time/effort/money etc., given that we don't have enough time/effort/money to fix all the problems right now." And that sort of question is routinely answered by businessmen, economists, engineers, etc. And it's best approached in much the fashion I laid out above.
Are we on the same page in terms of
this message?
Xenophon
P.S. I realize that I dumped a screenful of text at you. It's written at that length to expose all the reasoning. But BotE-wise, that's a 30-second calculation.